Victorian Modernity: Literature 1880-1900

"Modernity" in the fin-de-siècle period meant progress, the "march of the intellect," technological innovation, urban growth, female emancipation, but it also meant fears of degeneration, moral decline, the rise of the crowd, and the degradation of the individual. This course considers how these contradictions come to a climax in the literature, art, and culture of the 1880s and 1890s. Authors include G. B. Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, Charles Algernon Swinburne, H. G. Wells, Olive Schreiner, George Egerton.